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The Eternal Return of Teaching in theTime of the Corporation

Greg Thompson and Ian Cook Murdoch University

Abstract

This article addresses the new conditions under which teachers are mak-ing the choice to teach. Our core contention is that the reorganisationof schools according to the logic of the corporation, as described inDeleuzes Postscript, is changing the flows and forces on the primarysurface of the classroom. These changes block the usual movements ofteaching to discipline, normalise and individualise, which was the roleof the school as precursor to the factory. Blocked from repeating, orreturning, teaching as it has always been done, teachers must activelyre-will to teach; teachers cannot use order words to name themselvesand direct flows and forces as they have usually been done. While manychoices to teach will be undertaken, the most popular being that ofchoosing to teach toward the corporation, the repetition of teachingtoward enclosed spaces becomes less compelling. Like NietzschesZarathustra, teachers, who have the courage to actively choose, face anew dawn in which teaching cannot be what it once was. In that momentthey must choose to repeat that choice an infinite number of times, thechoice of eternal return, and it is from here that new times might begin.

Keywords: teaching, eternal return, Zarathustra, Deleuze and Guattari,metallurgy, control society

I. Introduction

Calls for radical change to education in general, and teachers andteaching in particular, are not new. However, contemporary governance

Deleuze Studies 8.2 (2014): 280298DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0146 Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/dls

Teaching in the Time of the Corporation 281

and policy reflect an amplification and intensification of change (orreform) agendas within which teaching finds itself. Using Deleuziannotions of the control society and eternal return, this paper arguesthat the flows and forces of the classroom are being reshaped by theintensification of corporate logics that privilege competition, rankingsand certain forms of closeness as agents for educational change. In thisabstract machine, teachers are paradoxically being asked to embracenew mechanisms while repeating past teachings. However, the challengefor us is to find ways within this machine to uncode flows, releaselines of flight and conceptualise teaching anew. To do this, we turnto Zarathustra and Deleuzes reading of eternal return to suggest thatone possible line of flight is that of a teacher whose indeterminacy,uncertainty and disruptive immanence is war machinic, where that focusis on challenging the order-word teach that binds many teaching actsto endless repetition.A new concept is required due to the darker and fiercer horizons

that face us (Roy 2008: ix). Disciplinary institutions such as schools,which have traditionally functioned as places of enclosure, affectingnormalisation as individualisation and marked surfaces (bodies,classrooms, knowledges), are adopting corporate and free-marketideology (Apple 2005). These surfaces break down, or deterritorialise, asdiscourses around education shift to embrace economic and productivelogics, which, as Hardt explains, progressively removes the distinction. . . between inside and outside (Hardt 1998: 140). One way to think ofthis is as a change in the different intensities of certain closenesses: onthe one hand, the closeness of a particular notion of morality and careas affected by various disciplinary and religious logics, and on the otherhand, the closeness of consumer to product, as affected by many newer,and increasingly compelling, corporate logics of education.This is not to say that these corporate logics, which Ball (2003)

describes as markets, managerialism and performativity, have notpreviously operated within educational surfaces. Schools have beenusing textbooks for decades; and using testing to bring about changes inclassroom teaching that speak to business logics of efficiency has a longhistory (Callahan 1964). Rather, the argument we make is that theselogics have become increasingly compelling, or intensified, directingflows and forming desires through these surfaces in recent times. Manyof the reforms of schooling, such as testing, rankings, standards, newcurriculums and new pedagogies, aim to open, or make visible, the insideof the classroom, and, to an extent, the inside of the teacher and studentswhose interactions form classrooms.

282 Greg Thompson and Ian Cook

Territories are constantly changing, shifting, as the machinic assem-blage of bodies, of actions and passions meets the collective assemblageof enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformationsattributed to bodies (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 88; original emphasis).This interaction is affected on a vertical axis, the assemblage has bothterritorial sides, or reterritorialised sides, which stabilize it, and cuttingedges of deterritorialisation, which carry it away (88). For example,teachers are called on to be professionals, while also being asked toaccept the role of deskilled technicians groomed to service the needs offinance capital and produce students who are happy consumers (Giroux2012). Good teaching, as a specific sign of good sense, is changing1

in a way dominated by the neoliberal governance of education itself,as exemplified by the requirement that educational institutions mustmake themselves auditable (Connell 2009: 21718; original emphasis).In education, this has led to global reform agendas that use policy andperformative practices to reshape teachers work, and by extension,teacher subjectivities (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). The imagination ofgood teaching is now dominated by corporatised notions of teachereffectiveness and quality (Connell 2009; Clarke 2012).The corporatised landscape of teaching is constructed within global

reform agendas (Rizvi and Lingard 2010) that increase distrust ofteachers (Gale 2006) and introduce greater external surveillance andauditing in/of classrooms (Thompson and Cook 2014a; Shore 2008).This landscape is dominated by powerful corporate bodies, such asPearson Education and Teach for America, and global policy experts,such as those in the OECD (Lingard 2010; Ball 2010), that promote theconsumption of educational products by inducing flows that necessitatedifferent returns of the teacher. While these affect discursive or signifyingshifts in teaching that are both externalised and internalised by theteacher, the teaching event is also changed. Teaching events are thosealways ephemeral incidents, contingent on material circumstances, andfull of action and motion and temporality. Unlike objects, events seem togobble up space and time, taking up the flow of temporality and spillingout into surrounding space (de Freitas 2013: 581). These new intensitiesand altered flows that are forming and intensifying call forth new eventsthat are new returns of teaching.These new abstract machines of education, which privilege specific

outputs and measures, change what is being produced on this surface.Education works differently. These new returns of teaching in theclassroom place less importance on flows that manifest (and induce)care for curriculum. Nor can they follow transcendent patterns of the


good student at a particular stage of his or her development. These flowpatterns are losing intensity, while other lines through which forces flowintensify. It is not a question of what needs to be known but one of using,even becoming, streams of indexation or evaluation (understood simplyas the ascription of some value according to an index of valuation).Wallin argues that the commodification of contemporary educationis characterised by the often-valorised notions of perpetual becoming,interminable prolongation, and recommencement (Wallin 2010: 133;original emphasis). These notions signal new flows into and out of theclassroom, these new machines of commodification, and change whatcan be spoken of as teachers and teaching.One example of this is the new flows of surveillance through databases

and accountability that opens the classroom. Teachers are encouragedto constantly channel and facilitate a students willingness to swim inthe sea of data (always affected by specific currents). In doing so, theyprepare their students for testing and, more specifically, the test to come.The result is that the teacher no longer directs striated curriculum flowstoward student bodies (teachers are not to teach to the test). In thisinstance, the disciplinary logic of care for individual students is beingoverlaid (or superimposed) by the produced desire to be responsive tothe data generated.

II. The Corporatisation of the School

The school, like all disciplinary institutions and, indeed, society itself, isbeing overtaken by what Deleuze refers to as the corporation, but whatwe refer to as corporate logics, or the logic of the corporation (in orderto emphasise the noology in play). While Deleuze accepted Foucaultsaccount of the organisation of disciplinary societies as a series of sitesof enclosure through which individuals pass, he was convinced thatwe were leaving them [enclosed spaces of disciplinary society] behind(Deleuze 1995b: 178). For Deleuze, the central expression in societies ofcontrol is the corporation:

The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinctanalogical spaces that converge towards an owner-state or private power butcoded figures deformable and transformable of a single corporation thatnow has only stockholders. (Deleuze 1995b: 181)

The corporations axioms overlay (or are superimposed on) thedisciplinary traditions of the liberal democratic institution (Savat 2009).Continuousness is one example. Disciplinary societies had termination


points for each of their spaces (from family to school to factory perhapsvia barracks, prison or hospital each of which finishes with its subjectsat some point). In a disciplinary society one was always starting again,whereas in control societies one is never finished with anything thecorporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastablestates coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal systemof deformation (Deleuze 1995b: 179).The rise and ubiquity of the corporation, understood as a noology

or way of thinking, means that all other institutions gradually adoptcorporate logics. For, just as the corporation replaces the factory,perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous controlto replace the examination, [which is] . . . the surest way of deliveringthe school over to the corporation (Deleuze 1995b: 179). When itcame to the school system, Deleuze noted the emergence of continuousforms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, thecorresponding abandonment of all university research, the introductionof the corporation at all levels of schooling (182). Schools do notdisappear but are reorganised or retooled and teaching is reconfiguredwithin modulatory policy machines (Thompson and Cook 2014a),digital surveillance technologies (Bogard 1996) and the increasinglyperformative cultures operating at all levels of education (Ball 2003).Certain desires are encouraged; the desire for patterns that representbetter numbers as evidence of the quality, and therefore linearity andrecordability, of events overlays the care for individuals.In a control society Individuals have become dividuals, and masses,

samples, data, markets, or banks (Deleuze 1995b: 180). Whereas indisciplinary societies enclosures served to mould individuals according tospecific requirements, controls are a modulation, like a self-deformingcast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, orlike a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point (179).The computer as database constantly evaluates the dividuals newposition like floating rates of exchange, modulated according to arate established by a set of standard currencies (180). The continuouscollection of data on teaching, such as through high-stakes testing,value-added measures and continual re-accreditation, exemplify thisdividuation. Teachers must understand and practise teaching in thecontext of auditable outputs assembled anonymously and at a distancefrom the classroom. Care for students knowledge (curriculum) as someconcern for bodies close by, is represented, at best, through commodifiedmeasures or becomes meaningless and counter-productive (such as whenschools focus attention only on the performance of those students who


may improve test scores). It is not that teachers have stopped caring fortheir students; it is that this does not register in databases measuringquality. Mercieca argues that these corporate ethics of standardisationand performativity infusing schools give the teacher permission tonot get involved in the lives of students (Mercieca 2012: 44). Thechallenge is to understand teaching in terms of forces, flows and the waysteachers connect to children, despite the policy environment which aimsto remove or distance them. In other words, we need new theoreticalweapons that enable the teacher and students to surpass the idea ofthemselves and the kind of life they live (44).

III. The Classroom as Surface

To explore the effects and affects of the logic of the corporation onthe school in this paper, we conceive the classroom as a surface. Thisboth reflects the topological character of Deleuzian theory (Thompsonand Cook 2014c) and registers the character of the corporation asspirit or gas (Deleuze 1995b). In a disciplinary system a classroom isunderstood as an enclosed and limited space; whereas in a control societya classroom can best be understood as a surface formed by streamlines orlaminar flows (Savat 2013: 175). Mechanisms on this surface combine toform machines that interrupt certain flows, release specific energies andoperate with varying degrees of intensity. The nature of the classroomis not given before this classroom is constituted but as it is constituted.Fixing our gaze on the classroom is a risky one, and we acknowledge thetemptation to define it, set limits and codify or represent it as certainty.However, we use the term to designate the concrete space where virtualand actual flows, multiple temporalities (past, presents and futures) andevents meet to produce and capacitate bodies and acts of enunciation.So the classroom has to be continually made and remade as an eventand is remade through the forces and flows that traverse the space toproduce a territory.The classroom, then, is an event formed by and as specific

interactions that bring a change in intensity where the virtual and actualre-combine and the effects of this change multiply and proliferate themany futures of the situation (de Freitas 2013: 588). Furthermore, theseevents are relatively common at the molecular, albeit less common at themolar.2 The point is not that we seek events in the classroom; they arealready occurring, and will continue to occur. Rather, it is that we seek tounderstand which events are being enabled, affected, made more likelywithin the current regime of signs, and what possibilities there are to


affect new possibilities beyond that classroom. To paraphrase Deleuze,we think any classroom is defined by its lines of flight, it flees all overthe place, and its very interesting to try and follow the lines of flighttaking shape at some particular moment or other (Deleuze 1995a: 171).In this, we see the potential of this theorising to put education to workfor its own undermining (Pederson 2012: 366). To do this, we mustgrapple with teaching and Deleuzes eternal return.In this construction, then, the classroom is less a static location

than a moment where the two planes, or surfaces, of consistencyand organisation intersect and interact to form territories. A territoryhas two notable effects: a reorganisation of functions and a regroup-ing of forces (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 320; original emphasis). Thisreorganisation and regrouping is fluid and dynamic, and constitutedthrough the de- and re-territorialising planes of consistency andorganisation. The plane of consistency is the relations of speed andslowness between particles that implies movements of deterritorial-isation (270). The plane of consistency is continually engaging with theplane of organisation, which is constantly working away at the planeof consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interruptthe movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them,reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth (270). Teaching,then, is a way of occupying the territory of the classroom, in responseto the flows, couplings, and forces that move with varying speedsand slownesses across that surface. While these may be spatial, theymust also be temporal; the teaching-event constantly moves betweenorganisation and consistency, while also being produced through habitsand memories of past and present teaching events (Thompson and Cook2014b). Another way to approach the teaching event is, as Zemblyassuggests, recognising that it has always been a game of knowingand unknowing, learning and ignorance that requires a pedagogy ofunknowing (Zemblyas 2005: 140).The important thing is that the classroom surface formed requires

oscillation. The speeds and slownesses of flows that capacitate bodies invarious ways, legitimate various enunciative acts on the communicativesurface are always machinic. New machines, new logics and moreimportantly, new intensities of old logics arrayed on the surface, formand reform. How can we understand this flux, what tools do we have tobegin to map the ways that this surface works? In the following section,we present the idea of oscillation as central to beginning to map theaffects of educational surfaces, in which new flows and forces emergeas corporate logics interact with pre-existing assemblages of teaching.


This has the potential to produce both repetition and difference depend-ing upon the machines at work, as we discuss in later sections.

IV. Metallurgic Returns

If we conceive the school to be a series of modern disciplinary events thatcontinually refounded a certain territory, then the classroom was, fromthe beginning, a surface produced by what we describe as metallurgicreturns. The metallurgic return is the repetition of the same movement,and one that we think mirrors that of Deleuze and Guattaris conceptof the metallurgist. There are multiple ways of thinking teaching, andtherefore the classroom, that are fundamental to the forces, flowsand connections that form the teacher, student and classroom as aprecursor to other institutions of enclosure. One of these noologies ofthe classroom reflects its place in the transitions from family to factory.It is a spatiality of preparation for a world of work. Another noologyhas the classroom as a space of interaction of bodies. It is a close-bystate that manifests the qualities of haptic interaction. Both of thesenoologies operate in the disciplinary classroom and teaching becomesoscillation, an alternation between two drives or passions: one to instilknowledge, to mould or shape; the other to be with, to be close-by.It is not a case of extinguishing one drive and its passions for theother drive and its passions. Both movements must be performed fora disciplinary classroom to form, and it is a question of which prevailsat some moment. As Smith points out, when we talk about the I, weare primarily indicating which, at the moment, is strongest and sovereignwithin us; my so called self-identity is in fact a differential flickeringfrom drive to drive (Smith 2012: 327). Thus the I-teacher who adoptsa close-by, haptic position and the I-teacher who adopts a transcendent,distanced or optic position is the same I-teacher, but one inhabited by adifferent passion or drive. In each moment a particular will is expressedagainst or over other wills and this becomes I. For each of us hasmultiple perspectives on the world because of the multiplicity of ourdrives drives that are often contradictory among themselves, and thatare therefore in a constant struggle or combat with each other (326).The crucial point is that both the movements of moulding and the

movements of being close-by must be continually enacted; for the mouldcan only be introduced once the ore has been found and readied forthat mould. In moving close to the student a teacher affects passionand sincerity that will permeate the atmosphere of the class, the learn-ing context and the subsequent educational practice (Cole 2011: 553).


This affect does not determine the encounter with students, as it willmeet an undifferentiated plane in the educational context between thestudents that will draw in parts of their social lives and perhaps notactively involve the teacher (553). This produces a surface that functionswith an ethico-spatial register that regulates how a teacher moves ormore precisely, what movement is possible within which space (Deleuzeand Guattari 2005). Only by moving close can the teacher fully enclosethe student through normalisation as individualisation.Teachers, in disciplinary spaces, have always moved between

machines that lead them to acquire a sense of the ideal student (as theproductive-disciplined student-toward-worker) and practices and affectsin the classroom in face-to-face/body-to-body relations with students(Thompson and Cook 2013). The close-by captivating confluenceswith students that occur as teaching are not the directive-machinesthat provide the mould that teachers are to reproduce. There is abalance, a series of oscillations between the close-by interactions withthe students and the far-away machines of curriculum, policy and othernormalising machines. There is also, as de Freitas suggests, a back andforth movement between past and future, as each teaching event isa moving and unravelling thread trailing off behind and ahead (deFreitas 2013: 588). It is too easy to say that these are the macro andmicro effects, because they interact, overlap and flow. The importanceof this discussion is that teaching oscillates to induce flows that havepreviously resulted in a disciplinary classroom as a matter of course.Teachers have regularly faced a challenge of returning. For questions

of what it is to be a teacher arise when teachers must link theirinside (events, ethics, interactions) with the outside (logics of teaching,policy, overcoded representations, morality) associated with producingthe right kind of teaching through the immediacy of close-byinteractions with students. In this, the teacher is like the metallurgist.Whereas the metallurgist follows the seams or flows of ore to producemetal implements, the teacher follows the flows on the planes ofconsistency and organisation with students that potentially producesevents. The back and forth movement of territorialisation requires thatthe teacher/metallurgist is always having to actively choose.Teachers, like metallurgists, are in themselves double: a hybrid,

an alloy, a twin formation (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 415). Thisoscillation that produces events means that the classroom alwayscontains possibilities (lines of flight) that have only been enhanced bythe ways in which new (and old) forces and flows operate with alteredand/or specific intensities and limits. The working to and fro between


closeness and distance places teaching in constant flux. However, wewould be foolish to allow this oscillatory function to stand as somepining for a disciplinary past within these new machines. Rather,the question of what is possible, what is beyond the control, shouldnot privilege a return of the certainty, and indeed violence, of thedisciplinary.Also like metallurgists, teachers come under the control of the

state while enjoying a certain technological autonomy, and socialclandestinity, so that, even controlled, they did not belong to the Stateany more than they were themselves nomads (Deleuze and Guattari2005: 405). They may have been exposed to ordering but remainedartisans who were determined in such a way as to follow a flow ofmatter . . . The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow theflow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It is intuition in action (409;original emphasis).Teachers in the society of control must ask themselves new questions

of return, and in enacting and instantiating those self-interrogationsas will to power return same as difference. They must find new waysto finish the sentences: Teaching is . . . , Teachers are . . . , Studentsare . . . and Classrooms are . . . . And teaching in classrooms willbe affected anew. No longer able to care as they once had and toreturn their teaching in a classroom striated by the state, teaching ina control society is care for scores, for externalities. It is no longer carefor students in the service of the state, but care for students scores inthe service of the corporation as manifested by an inexorable rivalrypresented as healthy competition (Deleuze 1995b: 179). This representsa significant transformation in the notion of care itself (Savat 2013: 15;Stiegler 2010).

V. Eternal Return and the Teacher

But metallurgic returns of the same are not the only forms of return, and,for Deleuze fall short of Eternal Return. The teacher is choosing, but itis not a profound existential choice of a moment to be repeated forever.Flows associated with metallurgic returns were facilitated, energisedand resourced (these might all be the same thing) in the disciplinaryclassroom. They are no longer facilitated, energised and resourced atthe same levels in a classroom coming to manifest the logic of thecorporation. New horizons face teachers. They can work feverishly tomaintain the flows and repeat a bizarre caricature of metallurgic returns.Or they can choose otherwise. Teachers who have been used to working


with and within the various striations that overlay and underpin theclassroom may no longer be able to continue to teach as they have donepreviously. As a result of the effects of corporate logics in and as theclassroom, teachers face a landscape unlike that for which they havebeen prepared and in which they are confronted with choices more directand disturbing than those to which they are accustomed in a disciplinarysociety. This means that the usual (lesser) moments in which the questionwhat am I doing teaching? is becoming the question who am I?The bringing forth of a moment of deeper choice requires an

engagement with eternal return (a concept from Nietzsche that Deleuzedeploys in a particular manner). This is not because teachers face eternalreturn for the first time, as their betweenness makes eternal return alwaysin question. Teachers face eternal return in a corporate landscape,however, that makes returning the same as the same (disciplinary copy)increasingly difficult, and the attempt to manifest sameness becomesauthentic and disruptive (that is, simulacral) difference. Good teachinghas become coded through and within corporation-speak, rather thanthe disciplinary past; we hear references to value-added measures,efficiency, quality, all understood within neoliberal reforming agendasthat no longer require teachers to manifest moulding.While many teachers will refuse eternal return for as long as they

are able, at some point teachers have to do something else. Each mustforcefully re-will him- or herself to become another teacher. To do thisthey must manifest will to power, as this is crucial for the eternal returnof teaching in a classroom within which important disciplinary striationshave been smoothed by the corporation. For Deleuze, eternal return andwill to power are the two most fundamental concepts in the Nietzscheancorpus (Deleuze 2004a: 117). Will to power defines human being and isthe motor of return.This is significant because on any given day, across the Western

world, thousands of teachers walk into their classroom and beginto teach. While we must not forget that there was teaching beforethere were classrooms or even teachers, each time a teacher walksinto a classroom something particular happens, a particular momentof teaching is enacted. And while this teacher finds him- or herself inthis classroom, it is not for the first time and not for the last time.The questions that arise here concern what connects these momentsof teaching. In the first instance, each of these teachers walking intoeach of these classrooms repeats what they have done before. Theyenact teaching as they understand it, and as they have been trainedto understand it. This teacher walks into this classroom and his or


her teaching begins, as it has begun before by this and every otherteacher.Life, according to Nietzsche, must ever surpass itself (Nietzsche

1954: 125; original emphasis). It is a will to procreation, or impulsetowards a goal, towards the higher, remoter, more manifold (125).Will to power is not simply a drive to survive which would be betterserved by maintaining a state of equilibriumbut a drive to expand,to go forth and multiply, to become ever more numerous (Keeping2012: 778). Enacting will to power is recognising our responsibility forgood and evil, and making good and evil our good and evil. Choosingthe right thing to do now is to destroy the right thing to do then.Choosing the right way to teach now is manifesting will to power. Forgood and evil which would be everlasting it doth not exist! Of its ownaccord must it ever surpass itself anew (Nietzsche 1954: 125). Thus, hewho hath to be a creator in good and evil verily, he hath first to be adestroyer, and break values in pieces (126).Following Deleuze, the moment of eternal return requires an

embracing of my fate and not passive acceptance of my fate (as someNietzscheans would have it3). In affirming my fate, amor fati, I embraceall that I have done in the past that leads to this moment of eternalreturn of the same as different. It is an active affirmative event. If theeternal return requires us to engage a will to do this forever, then itrepresents a profound existential moment (though not an individualmoment). Eternal return requires active choosing and it is this activechoosing in a landscape radically altered by the corporation that makesthe return of the same as the same (copying) increasingly impossible formost teachers.4

Once teachers recognise and embrace eternal return (as many arebeing forced to do), they have no choice but to re-will to teach ina manner that they will return infinitely. They must be creative, oras Mercieca has suggested, surpass the forces and flows that havetypically designated teaching in order to embrace a becoming-teachingthat requires new organisations of flows, forces and understandings ofthe limits of connectivity (Mercieca 2012: 46). It is the thought ofthe eternal return that selects. . . . The thought of the eternal returneliminates from willing everything that falls outside the eternal return,it makes willing a creation, it brings about the equation willing= creating (Deleuze 1983: 69). The principal question, though, is notone of the origins of the creativity that is affected as will to power,but of its qualities and of its force. The crucial difference is betweenteaching that is willed with little force or intensity and that which is


willed forcefully and with maximal intensity. The eternal return is thenew formulation of the practical synthesis: whatever you will, will it insuch a way that you also will its eternal return (68; original emphasis).Anothers power, a recollection of some teacher from my past, may flowthrough a teachers body that affects it, but this must be done intenselyto affect will to power and eternal return of my teaching (and not out ofhabit).Even if eternal return implies recurrence, it only does so to deny the

return of the same, Similar or Identical. Each of these is of the past,whereas repetition as will to power and eternal return is of the future. Itis of teachings future. It is a calling into the future, as a repetition thatlooks forward to future repetitions. In the end, or beginning, what isproduced, the absolute new itself, is in turn nothing but repetition: thethird repetition, this time by excess, the repetition of the future as eternalreturn (Deleuze 1994: 90). Eternal return brings something into beingwhich cannot do so without changing nature (71). For teachers, this is aprocess of selecting as teacher, or teaching, and enacting this with force.This reminds us that will to power and eternal return concern

intensities. Nietzsches eternal return is taking us into a dimension yetunexplored: neither extensive quantity nor local movement, nor physicalquality, but a domain of pure intensities (Deleuze 2004b: 122). As theinstrument and expression of the will to power, the eternal return raiseseach thing to its superior form, that is its nth power and eliminateshalf-desires (125). The eternal return and will to power do notdemand that one cease doing, to cease teaching for example, but todo whatever we choose to do to the nth degree. In being subjectedto new forces, teachers must engage teaching with a heretofore lostintensity. (To do so, for us, requires attaining the speed of the nomadand, therefore, the possibility of becoming-war machines.) It is to thisfuture that we also look in this discussion of eternal return, will to powerand teaching in the control society.

VI. Zarathustra and Teaching

If we follow Nietzsches story of Zarathustras returns, we think thismakes sense of the situation in which teachers find themselves andthe choices that confront them. For us, Zarathustra performs twometallurgic returns before realising that the only way to be a teacher(of will to power, which is the highest truth) is to engage eternalreturn and make an active choice Different from every choice he orshe has previously made. Nietzsches Zarathustra illustrates both the


metallurgic movement and that movement that engages eternal return.The paradox for the contemporary teacher, who understands and iscomforted within contours of the disciplinary apparatus of the schoolbut is increasingly forced to encounter a new conception of teaching ina control society (replete with heightened intensities and a sense thathis or her disciplinary care is under attack), mirrors the experiencesof Nietzsches Zarathustra. To us, Zarathustra expresses the hopesand frustrations of teaching, trying to understand change and engageethically with a post-ethical (post-disciplinary) world. Zarathustra is ateacher, and in his journey we gain some tools to better understandteaching.While he is up the mountain (the metallurgist is likely to be digging),

Nietzsches Zarathustra discerns the coming of the Higher Ones. Hedescends to tell the nearby townsfolk of their future but they laughat him and think him a fool. He has not connected. But still am Ifar from them, and my sense speaketh not unto their sense (Nietzsche1954: 15). He goes back up the mountain to, in our reading, reflecton his teaching practice. He realises that he must connect and seeksliving companions, who will follow me because they want to followthemselves (17). He fails once more, however, when his companionsbecome believers. Believers cannot become Higher Ones.Zarathustras is a far more demanding mould than those teachers

enact. He seeks self-made people. Ye had not yet sought yourselves:then did ye find me, he complains. He is forced to bid those who seek tolearn from him to lose me and find yourselves; and only when ye haveall denied me, will I return unto you (Nietzsche 1954: 823). While itis demanding, it remains for us available, as a result of the effects of thelogic of the corporation on the classroom. The classroom is not what itonce was. The teacher cant simply return the old processes associatedwith moulding the future worker.We note that leaving the classroom is the last of Zarathustras

teaching movements. He comprehends his greatest sin and what hemust do as a teacher to correct this. His greatest sin turns out to be Fellow-suffering! Fellow-suffering with the higher-men! (Nietzsche1954: 368; original emphasis). This he must end by leaving; for hehas his work to do. This is my morning, my day beginneth: arisenow, arise, thou great noontide! Thus spake Zarathustra and left hiscave, glowing and strong, like a morning sun coming out of gloomymountains (368; original emphasis).As Deleuze pointed out, Nietzsche did not finish Thus Spake

Zarathustra and we do not know what was to become of its central


figure (Deleuze 2004a: 117). We note, however, that for Deleuzethe revolutionary problem today is to find some unity in ourvarious struggles without falling back on the despotic and bureaucraticorganization of the party or State apparatus (Deleuze 2004b: 260). Thiseternal return has the potential to help answer Deleuzes questions: whoare todays nomads, who are todays Nietzscheans? in the classroom(260).

VII. The Challenge of Zarathustra

So, now that the metallurgic return is blocked, the challenge ofeternal return is for the first time real and the infinitive to teachand the order word teacher must be actively re-willed, becauseteaching has to be actively re-willed Differently, due to effects ofthe logic of the corporation. The problem for teaching is that theusual practices for constituting the territory teaching are beginningto function through different oscillations. Two affects are important.First, the corporations logic prevents the classroom from returningindividualisation, which was hitherto its function. This diminution ofnormalising flows toward individualisation in the classroom and theintensification of dividuating flows mean that specific flows of the close-by have increased energy. Normalisation as individualisation requiredacting at a distance according to a transcendent model. It necessitatedthe return of an optic relationship in which students were positionedaccording to externally determined notions of the normal and normalprogression. The second affect of the increased impact of the logic of thecorporation in the classroom is that haptic teacher student relationshipsare more likely to eventuate. This is significant, as Roy notes, becausehaptic space is insurgent space, whose gradients are produced regionby region, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, through connections,deterritorializations, intensities and observances (Roy 2005: 32). Mostimportantly, for this discussion, haptic space induces new becomings,and is reciprocally produced by such becomings (32). It is to thebreaking of habits, or habitual returns, that we must now shift ourattention, for it is here that the importance of eternal return in theclassroom may be found.There are no longer teachers and students, there are singularities,

creative, unfettered and acentred, such that each becoming-teacher/student manifests speed. To put it another way, teachers must changehow they move so as not to induce a classroom of any type orconfiguration. It is not enough to get close to the students a frequent


tactic that Foucault saw as a strategy of biopower played out inthe classroom (Foucault 1988) and which we understand in terms ofnormalising individualising oscillations. Rather, the event that might becalled teaching requires a letting go, an embracing of unthought, non-identitarian potentials (Wallin 2011: 286; original emphasis). There isno easy movement for teachers trapped by the natural inner movementof the classroom (Jones 1990: 74).Nor is it enough to suggest that for teachers to embrace eternal

return the classroom must go online or become flipped by technology,because classrooms are still centred places ordering and categorisingstill function. The teacher who embraces eternal return must let go ofteaching and the name of the teacher. It is not possible, as some havesuggested, to adopt pedagogy and curriculum practices as nomadicwhile participating in and releasing flows as teaching through corporatelogics. This must be a political act, the teacher embracing a line offlight that delimits nothing, that describes no contour, that no longergoes from one point to another but instead passes between points [. . .]a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form orbackground, beginning or end (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 4978;original emphasis). And this may be one possibility of Deleuze andGuattaris concept of the war machine, that turns its disruptive potentialonto the Oedipalised, certain and constrained flows contained in theorder-word teacher. After all, as Wallin suggests:

the task of creating a pedagogical life is not that of occupying a ready-made plane or territorialising a new space in ones name. Rather, the task ofcreating a life might be thought as one whereby we learn to occupy a plane inorder to make it holey, that is, to introduce fractal contours upon its striatedform, preparing the ground for emergence of a people yet to come. (Wallin2010: 130; original emphasis)

VIII. Conclusion

The teacher is not alone in being confronted by, and being affordedthe possibility of, embracing the future and the future of the future(in willing for a repetition that will be repeated, if not always in thesame way, eternally). In the teacher we find at least one of those whosemovements have been changed, even while staying the same, by the in-tensifications produced by the increasing effects of the logic of thecorporation (we also find the doctor caught in the super-clinic and thepolitician trapped in the endless opinion poll). Joyful, exuberant and


vibrant engagement (return) to a classroom made anew and made for afuture embraced becomes possible. As do darker outcomes.

Notes1. Discursive formations and construction of good teaching have always been

responsive to shifting social, political and economic imperatives (Jones 1990).These have an effect on logics of regulation and registration (Connell 2009),teacher education (Moore 2004) and public perceptions of what constitutesbecoming-teacher.

2. This explains for us Deleuzes comment in an interview with Negri that: Theysay revolutions turn out badly. But theyre constantly confusing two differentthings, the way revolutions turn out historically and peoples revolutionarybecoming (Deleuze 1995a: 171).

3. This, for Deleuze, wrong interpretation is forcefully presented by Malabou(2010).

4. As Ward points out, Deleuze seems to feel that a great deal is at stake ingetting the interpretation of eternal return right (Ward 2012: 107). Centralto this right interpretation is Deleuzes view that eternal return was not therepetition of the identical . . . [but] evoked a process of transformation in whichreactive forces were eliminated (101). Kerslake makes two vital observationsin this context. Embracing my past, by understanding it as the past that I willed,necessitates that the I who wills the past must be different from the I whotook themselves to be determined by the past (Kerslake 2007: 36). This meansthat I cannot project an identical self into the future because the eternal returnimplies the dissolution of the identical subject in the future as well. Eternal returnimplies that if I am going to re-will a previous action, I will only be able to do soby taking it as the act of another, someone with whom I can no longer identifymyself (367). We also concur with those who reject the view that Nietzscheadopted a determinist position that meant that amor fati must be love of onesfuture fate. Nietzsche casts fate in terms of that which was rather than thatwhich must be (Grof 2003: 35).

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